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News ID: 72509
Publish Date : 10 November 2019 - 22:01

‘Saudi Arabia Killed Another Journalist, Twitter Played Role’

RIYADH (Press TV) – Informants in Twitter's regional office in Dubai have reportedly provided Saudi Arabia with information about a dissident journalist who died as a result of torture while in custody.
The British daily Metro reported that Turki bin Abdul Aziz al-Jasser was arrested in March 2018 for allegedly running a Twitter account called Kashkool, which exposed human rights violations by Saudi authorities and royals.
An anonymous source said a so-called ‘Twitter mole’ handed over information on Jasser who was killed in November 2018 while in detention.
"They (Saudi authorities) got his information from the Twitter office in Dubai. That is how he was arrested," he said.
According to the source, Twitter has become insecure for dissidents or critics. "Everyone speaks under threat and pressure. The accounts of Saudi dissidents are spied on. We are not safe using Twitter."
The source also said Saud al-Qahtani, a former adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, leads a "cyber spy ring" and has contacts inside the Dubai Twitter office.
Qahtani was fired after being implicated in the brutal murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashogg inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. The Saudi crown prince said in September that he took responsibility but denied that he had ordered the slaying of Khashoggi.
In a post on his Twitter account in 2017, Qahtani alluded to three methods Saudi officials use to unmask activists on social media, warning that fake names could not protect critics.
"Does your nickname protect you from the #blacklist?" he wrote. "No. 1. States have a way of knowing the owner of the name. 2. IP can be identified in many technical ways. 3. The secret I’m not going to say."
The anonymous source said the tweet is "considered to be an intended threat."
The Middle East Eye (MEE) news portal on Saturday cited a complaint filed in a U.S. district court that revealed a meeting between the Saudi crown prince and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in New York in June 2016.
It took place six months after the social media giant learned that one of its engineers, a Saudi citizen named Ali Alzabarah, had been accessing the personal data of users.
The MEE also referred to a second legal complaint filed by the US government that said it wasn’t just a small group of users whose information Alzabarah had accessed and that he was not alone.
"The thing that strikes me is when you look through the government’s complaint, this guy hacked 5,500 records in June. That’s not a small number. It raises the question about what Twitter did and did not want to know,” said Mark Kleiman, an attorney who represents Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident living in Canada.